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Monday, January 1, 2024

More than 300 arrested on New Year’s Eve in Berlin as people shoot fireworks at police

 Berlin police detained over 300 people on New Year’s Eve after at least 14 on-duty officers were injured as people shot fireworks at each other and police throughout the city.

One of the incidents occurred near Alexanderplatz where around 500 people were letting off fireworks at each other before police dispersed the group at the landmark Neptune Fountain, reported DW.

The crowd fired at police with pyrotechnics when they tried to check them for fireworks, according to the outlet.

Security was high across Germany ahead of the final night of the year, with police detaining three more suspects on Sunday in an alleged Islamist plot to attack Germany’s famed Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve.

Dutch police arrest more than 200 during New Year riots

 Dutch police on Monday said more than 200 people had been arrested on New Year's Eve during riots throughout the country, in which dozens of police officers were injured.

Police in several cities were attacked with fireworks and stones, in what a spokesman told broadcaster NOS was a night of serious incidents and "unacceptable" violence.

Police in Rotterdam said more than 100 cars and other vehicles had been set on fire there, while in Amsterdam, The Hague and other cities riot squads were needed to disperse violent crowds.

Riot squads were also used throughout the country to assist fire brigades who were attacked with fireworks while they tried to put out numerous fires.

In the city of Haarlem, a 19-year old man died of injuries he sustained in an incident with fireworks shortly before midnight on Sunday, police said.

https://news.yahoo.com/dutch-police-arrest-more-200-120142856.html

Long-Term Brain Issues In COVID Patients May Be Linked To Disease Severity, Not COVID Itself: Study

 by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A new study reports that brain function can be impaired for 18 months after a person has recovered from COVID-19, especially if the individual was hospitalized. However, COVID-induced cognitive impairment is no more severe than impairment due to other diseases causing hospitalization.

The prospective cohort study, published in JAMA Network Open, suggests that the brain health of COVID-19 patients who were ill enough to go to the hospital suffered long-lasting neurological damage that included new psychiatric diagnoses, such as anxiety and depression, fatigue, and sleep issues. Previous studies showed these symptoms occurred among 12 percent to 50 percent of individuals one year after infection. Consistent with these findings, this study found that about 38 percent of study participants still had cognitive symptoms at the 18-month follow-up.

The results offer insight into long-COVID symptoms and how the virus can affect the brain over time. Although fewer people are being hospitalized for COVID-19, just over 20,000 Americans were hospitalized for the virus during the last week of December.

Disease Severity, Not Necessarily Type, May Influence Cognitive Impairment

Researchers looked at 120 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at two hospitals in Copenhagen between March 2020 and March 2021. The average patient was 61 years old, and over half of patients (58 percent) were men. The COVID patients were compared to a control group of hospitalized patients, which included 50 who had non-COVID pneumonia, 50 with myocardial infarction, and 25 in non-COVID-related intensive care.

Both the COVID patient group and the control group were assessed for cognitive impairment, underwent psychiatric interviews and neurological examinations, and were assessed for fatigue after they were released from the hospital.

When comparing the COVID group with the non-COVID hospitalized control group, the research team found both groups fared similarly in cognitive, psychiatric, and neurological tests 18 months after they left the hospital. However, the COVID group was worse off in overall executive function and sense of smell. Older patients with COVID-19 had a higher risk of cognitive impairment than healthy controls, the research team noted. COVID patients also experienced more psychiatric issues, sleep issues, and problems involving memory between the six-month and 18-month follow-up periods.

Despite COVID patients understandably experiencing more cognitive issues than healthy controls, those hospitalized both for COVID and non-COVID illnesses showed comparable cognitive impairment, leading researchers to theorize that cognitive impairment is determined more by illness severity and hospitalization than COVID-19.

The new study adds to a growing body of evidence that COVID-19 contributes to cognitive decline, including diminished memory and attention and sleep disturbances. A study conducted by Harvard Medical School in April 2022 noted that patients hospitalized with COVID-19 had such trouble recalling words and paying attention that their cognitive decline equated to losing 10 IQ points. Patients who had to be intubated on ventilators experienced more brain fog, the study found.

COVID-19 Impacts Vital Brain Regions

According to a July 2023 article published in Frontiers in Neurology, scientists believe the SARS-CoV-2 virus damages vital brain regions such as the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex. These parts of the brain are responsible for learning and memory, as well as other fundamental cognitive processes like decision-making, learning, and cost-benefit analysis.

How the virus damages the brain is still being studied. The Frontiers in Neurology article hypothesizes that COVID-19 creates neuroinflammation, disrupting neural circuits and connections; in other words, the virus short-circuits parts of the brain, especially the sympathetic nervous system, responsible for reacting to stress. A short-circuited sympathetic nervous system, combined with damaged cognitive function, can leave the brain vulnerable, according to researchers.

Understanding the mechanisms of how COVID-19 affects the brain can help doctors and physicians better treat those who suffer from long COVID, defined as experiencing COVID symptoms at least four weeks after initial infection, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Symptoms of long COVID often involve myriad mental health and brain-related issues, including tiredness or fatigue that interferes with daily life, depression, change in smell or taste, headache, and difficulty thinking or concentrating—sometimes called brain fog.

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/long-term-brain-issues-covid-patients-may-be-linked-disease-severity-not-covid-itself-study

Ohio Governor Who Vetoed Bill Blocking Sex-Changes For Kids Took $40K From Pro-Trans Hospitals

 What a shock...

Ohio's 'Republican' governor, Mike DeWine, took over $40,000 from hospitals which prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children, before vetoing a bill that would outlaw puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children.

DeWine stunned state Republicans on Friday, vetoing House Bill 68, which would also prevent transgender athletes (dudes) from competing in girls' sports.

According to The Federalist Papers;

A review of donations from 2018 to 2023 reveals that the governor received a total of $40,300 from the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association (OCHA), Cincinnati Children’s, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and ProMedica Children’s Hospital.

The OCHA donated $10,000 to the Mike DeWine and Jon Husted Transition Fund on Dec. 28, 2018, and another $10,000 on Dec. 7, 2022, according to the report. This transition fund allows candidates to spend donations for “transition activities and inaugural celebrations,” as outlined in Ohio’s campaign finance handbook.

Affiliates of OCHA, such as Cincinnati Children’s and ProMedica, also made significant contributions. Cincinnati Children’s donated $300 on Dec. 15, 2022, and ProMedica, another affiliate of OCHA, donated $10,000 in December 2018. Nationwide Children’s, a third affiliate with OCHA, donated $5,000 in December 2018 and another $5,000 in January 2023 to the transition fund.

The Cincinnati Children's and Nationwide Children's hospitals, for example, offer gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and have no stated age limit guidelines for patients.

Nick Lashutka, president of the OCHA, slammed House Bill 68 during testimony, arguing that it "strips away" the rights of parents and their transgender children.

As The Federalist Papers' Elizabeth Allen notes, it's hard not to link the donations to DeWine's 11th hour veto of HB68.

Politics at its finest...

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ohio-governor-who-vetoed-no-sex-changes-children-took-40k-pro-trans-hospitals

The True Cost of Trading with the Enemy

 They say the generals are always fighting the last war, and sometimes there’s truth to that.

But in 2024, our ability to mount a wartime footing against our most likely enemy is most severely hampered, not by the readiness of our armed forces, but by our most likely enemy’s deep infiltration into not just our military, but the entirety of our civil life.

Consider our response when Russia  annexed Crimea in 2014, and then, again, when they escalated with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

We imposed economic sanctions on Russia and Belarus, banning many imports and exports. This was manageable because we have traditionally exported relatively little to them, and imported relatively little from them as well.  While these sanctions have certainly been enough to be felt (such sanctions tend to hurt us more than the other party, unfortunately), they could be imposed relatively easily, only because there was relatively little commerce to interrupt.

If we were to maintain a neutral position on the war, we would not have needed to do this at all.  It is a critical step, however, if there is a chance of joining the conflict. You cannot continue to trade with a country with which you are at war.

Imagine if we had been dependent on Germany and Japan for either finished goods or manufacturing components, on the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor? We obviously lost all commerce in both directions from that day until the end of the war; all pending orders were stopped; any of our dies or molds or manufacturing processes essentially became unavailable enemy property until the war’s end. 

Luckily, our dependence on these countries was minimal in 1941; our manufacturing sector could become independent of any countries on the other side of the war’s dividing lines, and we could ramp up domestic production to a wartime footing relatively quickly

As much as we may try to avoid thinking about it, we all know that the next country with which we are likely to go to war is the People’s Republic of China, a communist military dictatorship.

This isn’t an idle fear; China has been threatening our friends for years, recently ramping up not only the rhetoric but physical sea incursions as well.  Long known for funding and encouraging North Korea’s saber-rattling against South Korea, Japan, and the United States, Red China is now making actual moves on the Philippines and other South China Sea neighbors, as well as Taiwan.   As America’s leadership grows more impotent, China gets bolder and bolder, and understandably so.  Beijing knows that 2024 is likely their best opportunity ever to invade and annex at least one neighbor.  Such an invasion will surely create a larger war, and even if the U.S. doesn’t step in, there is no question but that all U.S.-China trade would necessarily come to an immediate halt.

We know from any random shopping trip that a majority of the finished goods that we buy in the store -- small appliances, electronics, clothing, shoes, toys, gifts -- are now made in China. Even most of the electrical products that we manufacture right here in the United States are made here of a wide array of components imported from China.  We might manufacture a refrigerator or oven in the USA, using American steel and American glass, but if the printed circuit board, power cord, heating elements or cooling condenser had to be imported from China, our domestic production even of those American-made products will stop cold the day the war starts.

When the inevitable war with China comes, consider what our current interdependence with China will mean to the American way of life:

  1. Many of our companies depend on exporting to China for their profit margin. Such exports will of course end immediately.  But that’s the least disruptive issue, compared to the rest:
  2. We buy countless finished goods from China.  Goodbye to that, for the duration.
  3. American factories buy countless components everything from off-the-shelf standard products to customized parts. Don’t assume we can just buy them from another country. For millions of globally-sourced parts, China is the only current source. It’s not a matter of ramping up production; it’s a matter of relearning how to make things.
  4. Countless American businesses “own” factories in China, where not only Chinese people work, but American and other foreigners do as well, often living there with their families.  Goodbye to those plants, and their output, and the U.S.-owned equipment, dies and molds, and personnel.
  5. Similarly, countless Chinese nationals are in the USA, working at American companies. Some are doubtless honorable immigrants; many are undoubtedly plants, foreign agents ready to be activated upon the breakout of hostilities.  How do we know which to deport, which to detain, which to welcome as immigrants?
  6. How many of our colleges depend on the billions of dollars per year in Chinese tuition and joint research grants (which also serve as a cover for stealing our technology?). Once hostilities are joined, the drying-up of this funding will cripple many of our colleges, as will the presence of a veritable army of likely foreign agents.
  7. How much of our transportation, logistics, and retail economies are dependent on trade with China. Millions of jobs?  Goodbye to much of that.
  8. Consider American-made cars dependent on China for the printed circuit boards that run their dashboards.  Consider American pharmaceutical companies who have many of their drugs made in China. Consider the computer networks that power your business, your home internet, your phone service, often local utilities too, most of which depend on Chinese equipment, Chinese parts, Chinese remote control. To how much of that must we say goodbye?

This is just a starting point.  There’s much more.  America has moved from traditional AC plug-in technology (which could be made anywhere) to cordless technology (which depends on lithium ion batteries almost entirely sourced in China).  Almost everything we do, everything we use, everything we depend on, is either partially or wholly dependent on trade with the most malevolent, militant, and expansion-minded country on earth.

Remember how destructive the “supply chain crisis” of 2021-2022 was? That was when we weren’t at war.  That was when we just couldn’t get parts for a couple months longer than usual.  Now imagine it being five years, or ten, or twenty.

President Trump tried to awaken us to this threat, and even implemented expensive punitive tariffs on Chinese goods, to shake some sense into the American business community.  As soon as it started to have an effect, and some American manufacturers started home-shoring again, our nation’s enemies installed Joe Biden in the office of the presidency to put a halt to that corrective process.

China plays the long game. We don’t know for sure if this will be the year it all happens.  But if China wants to do it at all, then it’s hard to imagine that there will ever be a better year for it than this one.

The sooner America wakes up, the better.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and trade compliance consultant. A one-time Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. Read his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II, and the brand new Volume Three).


https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/the_true_cost_of_trading_with_the_enemy.html

Disease is diverse and inclusive too

 The flood of illegal immigrants has brought with it human trafficking, rampant crime, known terrorists, sexual slavery, pedophilia, the drug deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, has enriched cartels beyond their wildest dreams and oh-so-much more. Another diverse and inclusive import is third-world diseases once all but eradicated in America. It’s becoming rather noticeable:

Following reports of data showing migration at the southern border smashed monthly records in December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused the Biden administration of "aiding and abetting" drug cartels. 

"We've got the Biden administration, as I said, aiding and abetting the cartels, encouraging the cartels to make billions of dollars and to bring as many people here as fast as possible, and as soon as possible," Paxton told Fox News’ Jason Chaffetz on "Sunday Morning Futures." "That's what the Biden administration is doing. They're not just not doing their job, they're actually encouraging the opposite," he added. 

And they’ve been doing it for years:

New York City’s health commissioner announced last week that the influx of migrants from the southern border — more than 50,000 to New York City alone in the past year — is delivering contagious diseases, including tuberculosis and polio, to our neighborhoods.

The same disease threats are also endangering other migrant destinations, including California, Texas and Florida.

In a letter to physicians and health-care administrators citywide, Commissioner Ashwin Vasan explained, “Many people who recently arrived in NYC have lived in or traveled through countries with high rates of TB.”

TB, short for tuberculosis, is a bacterial infection. It is treatable with antibiotics, but it generally takes six to nine months of medication to recover. Not a walk in the park.

TB spreads through the air, like flu or a cold. 

But how can this be? Surely every immigrant is carefully vetted at the border, like for Covid, whose lockdowns nearly destroyed the economy?  Of course, and have I told you I’m a Nigerian prince in exile, and if you’ll give me your bank account numbers, I’ll deposit millions for safekeeping, and you can keep some?

Immigrants who lawfully apply for a visa must undergo health screenings and show they are vaccinated, and refugees are screened for TB before entering the United States. 

Not so for those wading across the Rio Grande.

Nationwide, at least 6,009 of the 8,300 people with TB in 2022 were foreign-born, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Florida has been slammed with a 21% increase in TB since 2020.

Texas border counties have a TB rate triple the national average.

At least TB is treatable. Polio, on the other hand, can paralyze you for life.

The article explains other countries use inferior polio vaccines that can spread the disease, and polio, which was once eradicated in the US, is on the rise again. Only about 50% of illegals have received even the inferior, ineffective, vaccine, or so they say. And in Portland, and surely other blue-state social justice utopias, other microscopic imports abound:

Woke Democrats have caused an absurd amount of problems for law-abiding residents in Portland, including a surge in violent crime, out-of-control open-air drug markets, and widespread homelessness. Parts of the metro area have been transformed into a third-world-like state because of disastrous progressive policies. Now, the combination of failed policies has sparked what appears to be a public health crisis. 

A highly contagious bacteria called "shigella" is spreading across Portland. This bacteria is common in countries found in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia regions. 

"Shigella spreads when one person's infected poop gets into another person's mouth through food or water, from objects or surfaces with shigella bacteria on them, or during sex," Multnomah County said, according to local news outlet KOIN 6, adding, "Shigella spreads very easily. Even a very small amount is enough to make someone sick."

In December, there have been over 45 infections of the deadly bacteria in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties, with nine different strains found in Portland since October. For the year, 218 cases have been reported in the region. 

"Local disease patterns suggest that fecal-oral spread through sexual contact may account for between half and more than two thirds of all cases without international travel. The rest are typically attributed to other types of person-to-person spread including outbreaks among populations with lack of hygiene, shelter, and sanitation, and among people who use illicit substances," county officials told KOIN 6 News.

Hmm. From where could these different strains have suddenly come? Fortunately, Shigella can usually be successfully treated with antibiotics. Unfortunately, people die from common bacterial infections every day. They die from TB and polio too, perhaps not as often.

Yet another example of how illegal immigration is our diverse, inclusive and equitable strength, and for some Americans, their exclusive destruction.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor and retired police officer and high school and college English teacher.  His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/disease_is_diverse_and_inclusive_too.html

India’s Crude Oil Imports From Russia Plunge on Payment Issues

 

  • India’s December oil imports from Russia lowest since January
  • Despite challenges, Moscow remains India’s top crude supplier

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India’s crude oil imports from its largest supplier Russia plunged in December to their lowest since January 2023, as six tankers carrying Sokol grade oil could not deliver due to payment issues amid tightening sanctions, according to data intelligence company Kpler.

After rising to an all time record of 2.15 million barrels a day in May, oil imports from Russia fluctuated downwards, experiencing a sharp decline between November and December to 1.48 million barrels a day last month, according to Kpler data.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-01/india-s-crude-oil-imports-from-russia-plunge-on-payment-issues